


All Four of My Hearts Belong to You

by GalahadWilder



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/F, F/M, Timey Wimey, wibbly wobbly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-07-25 18:32:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16203221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalahadWilder/pseuds/GalahadWilder
Summary: The Doctor is over 12 billion years old, almost as old as the universe. Stars have been born and died out since the last time she saw Rose Tyler. And yet, when they bump into each other one day on a nondescript world, the Doctor discovers that she’s not over her old love. Not by a long shot.Now if only Ten weren’t there...





	1. Chapter 1

The Doctor is running. None of this is unusual; she’s got a Pycorean prince in a hamster ball inside one of her vast pockets, hiding from Senubite assassins, so she has to get as much distance as she can. Normal Doctor day, as Doctor days go.

This market was an old favorite of hers, back when she was silly and strange and wore a scarf as long as he was tall—best jelly babies in the universe, wouldn’t you know, but the next her had lacked that sweet tooth, so that particular location had been forgotten until centuries later when she was an uncoordinated man in a bow tie. He’d popped by to get an anniversary present for the Ponds, remembered the jelly babies, but his taste buds were all different and they’d tasted awful. She wonders if this new mouth has a sweet tooth, if she’d enjoy them again like she used to, but she doesn’t exactly have time to stop what with the swarming assassin-dog-wasps.

But stop she does, because she’s too preoccupied to look where she’s going, and instead slams face-first into another marketgoer.

The Doctor lands, most graceless and un-Doctor-like, on her rear. The person she hit stumbles, then turns. 

“Blimey!” the woman says, and the Doctor feels both her hearts stop in her chest. “Are you all right?”

 _Impossible_.

Twelve billion years since she last saw that face, since she last _expected_ to see that face, and suddenly a woman almost as old as the universe is a boy again, eight years old, staring into the Untempered Schism and beholding the impossibility of time itself.

“Hand of Omega,” she whispers in shock as both hearts threaten to explode out of her chest. She should have moved past this. She should have outgrown this. Rose Marion Tyler should not be having this effect on her.

Rose is looking at her, head tilted, confused. “Everything all right?” she asks again, and suddenly the Doctor remembers—she is supposed to be _running_.

Instincts buried for longer than Rose’s planet has existed kick into action before the Doctor even has time to think (which is practically attoseconds, for a Time Lady) and her fingers wrap around Rose’s slender wrist. The Doctor is already on her feet, bolting down the alleyway. “Run!” she shouts, dragging Rose along behind her.

“Doctor!” Rose shouts. “Where are we going?”

The Doctor hadn’t even tried to read Rose’s mind, but the connection was as automatic as it had been with River—they’d linked as soon as their skin had touched, and she knew that Rose was speaking not to _her_ Doctor, not to the skinny man in the suit with the hair, but to her: to Thirteen. Even if Rose hadn’t actually realized who she was. It was instinct, just like the grab had been. The drag, the shout of “run,” it was as familiar to Rose as breathing, and her reaction had been automatic. 

The hand feels unfamiliar against her own, but not because of the vastness of time between them—rather, the Doctor’s hand is so much smaller than it once was, and the sizes don’t quite match. Still, the exhilaration is the same. She’s running, running with Rose, and everything is going to be all right.

* * *

 

When they get a little more distance, the Doctor yanks Rose behind a door, slams it shut and locks it with a burst of sonic energy. Then she turns to her companion. “What are you even _doing_ here?” she says.

Rose, however, is staring at the fat, curved, pen-like object in her hand. “That’s a sonic screwdriver,” she murmurs.

The Doctor boggles. Oh, Rassilon’s testes. She’s given herself away.

“Yes, it is,” comes another voice, decidedly more male. At that moment, _he_ steps out from behind a corner, his face the absolute picture of The Oncoming Storm as he levels his own screwdriver, straight and thin, towards her face. “Who are you, and what do you want with my friend?”

Thirteen smirks. “Oh, what are you going to do, build a cabinet at me?” she says. She waggles her screwdriver. “That’s no more a weapon than this is.”

She’s so focused on the screwdriver that she doesn’t see Rose’s elbow coming for her face as the girl slams it backwards into Thirteen’s nose. She briefly registers a crack before a flare of pain blinds her, her fingers losing their grip on her screwdriver.

Something flops out of her pocket and rolls across the ground. Rolling. Hamster ball. THE PRINCE! 

She leaps for it, hand outstretched, only to see another, male, hand—Ten’s hand—reaching for the ball as well. She barely has enough time to cry out before they touch, and a blast of blue energy is swiftly followed by darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

A plastic hamster ball thunks against her nose.

The Doctor groans. She isn’t ready to wake up, not yet.

“Doctor! Wake up, please!”

Her eyes snap open at the sound of her name, immediately settling on the upside-down pink imp in lederhosen standing in front of her inside the ball. Well, not upside-down. The Doctor is on her back.

”Hello, Wankershim,” she says. “Sorry for the mess.”

“Right, you,” Rose says from somewhere near her feat. “Who are you and what’ve you done to the Doctor?”

The Doctor tilts her head and looks up to see Rose brandishing a rather large cannon, pointed directly at her face. “That’s a fire extinguisher,” the Doctor smirks. “Did you sneak that on board while I was in France with Reinette?”

Rose’s eyes narrow. “No, it’s a freeze ray.”

The Doctor rolls onto her side and lifts herself upward. “Fire extinguisher. And I showed you how to use it.” She’s on her feet, and Rose hasn’t even tried to pull the trigger. “He’s fine, he’ll wake up soon. _Blistering_ headache though.” As soon as the words pass her mouth, the pain splits her prodigious brain in half, as if reminded it’s supposed to exist. “Ah!” She grabs her forehead with one hand, staggers into the TARDIS console. Oh, grunge phase. She hasn’t missed THIS setup.

Rose immediately drops the fire extinguisher and rushes to the Doctor’s side to steady her. “What’s going on?”

“Blinovitch Limitation Effect,” Ten says from behind them. “Reapers aren’t the only thing that happens when you cross your own timestream.”

Thirteen can see it, the way Rose’s face lights up, and her stomach leaps into her esophagus at the sight. She’d forgotten that look, and the feeling it brought.

”Doctor!” Rose shouts, racing to hug him. “You’re all right!”

”Course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be all right?” he replies with a confused sort of half-hug back. He’s still staring at Thirteen, accusation across his face.

”I thought she’d hurt you,” Rose breathes.

”Nahhhh,” Ten drawls. “Nothing intentional, just the laws of temporal physics! For instance, if I take—”

”I’m not doing that,” Thirteen interrupts, sensing where he’s going with this. “You may be fond of waking up on the floor, but you don’t remember what being old feels like.”

Ten boggles. “Blimey! I forgot what conversations with me are like.” He steps forward to examine her, walking in a way that kind of reminds her of a chicken. “So which me are you? Next? Next but one?”

Thirteen ignores him and stretches out her hand to Rose. “Hello, Rose,” she says. “I’m the Thirteenth Doctor. It’s good to see you again.”

Ten freezes with a look of shock on his face. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Did you say _thirteen_?”

* * *

Thirteen, it turns out, has quite the craving for jelly babies, and she goes wandering off with the small pink man she calls Wankershim sitting comfortably in her pocket, gazing out at the rest of the TARDIS. For the moment, Rose and Ten are alone.

”Doctor, what’s going on?” Rose says. “Who is she?”

”She’s me,” the Doctor says with that little excited pout he does when he’s surprised by something but doesn’t want to show it. “Well, a future version of me anyway. I must’ve squeezed out an extra regeneration—”

”You can regenerate as a woman?”

”Oh, yeaaah,” The Doctor says. “One of us—the Corsair—switched genders with every regeneration!” He’s talking to distract himself as much as to answer Rose’s questions; for one fraction of a second, before she knew he was there, Thirteen had left her thoughts unguarded. And the Doctor had seen what was inside her mind when she looked at Rose.

Love... and guilt.

”And what was that thing, back at the bazaar? With the blue lightning?”

”It’s what happens when a time traveler touches their displaced self,” The Doctor hears himself saying, though the vast majority of his brain is still trying to puzzle out what, exactly, Thirteen was thinking that left her feeling so guilty. “Remember when your dad handed Baby Rose to you in the church? We’re lucky you two didn’t make skin contact, we could all have been vaporized.”

Rose grimaces, then leans in close. “Does she, you know...” she giggles. “Monthly?”

Ten smiles back. “Aw, Rose, I can consciously control the rate my hair grows, do you really think—”

He feels the frustration boiling from Thirteen’s unshielded mind seconds before she storms back into the console room, Pycorean prince still in her pocket. “WHERE DID YOU PUT THE BLOODY PANTRY?”


End file.
